jshen@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Jun Shen) (01/22/91)
* * * C H I N A N E W S D I G E S T * * *
January 20, 1991
0. Briefs...........................................................18
1. Mao Jiye Arrived in Vancouver Safely.............................36
2. Problems in China's Western Provinces...........................107
3. Liberal Economist Resigns from Gorbachev's Staff.................93
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0. Briefs.............................................................22
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The Pentagon reported today that ten SCUD missiles were fired at targets
in Saudi Arabia today from eastern Iraq. Nine of these missiles were
downed by Patriot anti-missile crews, and one fell into the ocean, the
spokesman said. It is still unclear as to whether a missile that
landed in Riyadh was a SCUD or an errant Patriot.
Israel will defer retaliation for this weekend's Iraqi missile attacks
until "a time of its own choosing"; it is felt that retaliation in
the form of an air or missile attack over Jordanian airspace is highly
unlikely.
The US has dispatched Patriot missile teams from Europe to Israel to
help defend against further attacks. Israel already has the weapon
system in place, but it was deployed quite recently and Israeli missile
crews have not yet finished training in its use.
In China, the government has stepped up security for foreigners,
especially Americans, due to fears of Iraqi terrorism in the country.
Japan may contribute an extra $5 billion to the Desert Storm effort,
bringing its total contribution to $7 billion.
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1. Mao Jiye Arrived in Vancouver Safely...............................36
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From: Run-Ping Qi <qi@cs.ubc.ca>
Source: Compiled from local sources by Mr. Qi, January 20, 1991
Mr. Mao Jiye, who tried but failed to return to China, arrived in
Vancouver, BC today by a flight of Japan Airlines.
Mao Jiye, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, is
a Chinese national with a valid passport of the People's Republic of
China. He left Vancouver for Beijing last Thursday. When he arrived at
Beijing International Airport, he was not allowed past customs but was
ordered to leave the country immediately.
The only reason he was given for denying his entry was that the
government believed the purpose of his visit to Beijing was to
conduct anti-government activities.
However, Mr. Mao feels that this accusation is groundless. In a press
conference shortly before he left Vancouver, Mao read a statement
saying that, as the representative of the Federation of Chinese
Students and Scholars in Canada (FCSSC), the purpose of his trip is to
observe the supposedly open trials of participants in 1989's massive
democracy movement. If observing open trials can be labeled by the
government as an anti-government activity, it is obvious what kind of a
government it is, said Mr. Mao. "It is also obvious that the trials
must neither open, nor fair."
In order to make sure Mr. Mao will not defy the government's order, his
parents were brought to the airport to "persuade" him. "I was really
shocked when I saw my parents. They looked so nervous. They almost lost
their voice." Mao Jiye said. "The first thing they asked me to do is to
confess the real purpose of my trip. Then, they explained to me that
there was no massacre in Tiananmen."
One hour after his arrival, Mao Jiye was led by two policemen to the
flight. His basic right to enter his own country was ruthlessly denied.
However, on the other side of the globe, on the land of a foreign
country, Mr. Mao Jiye was warmly welcomed by a group of Chinese
students and concerned Canadians.
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2. Problems in China's Western Provinces.............................107
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From: Wu, Fang <INT3FWU@mvs.oac.ucla.edu>
Source: Associated Press, January 18, 1991
Eastern provinces sent men and machines to open new farms and mines in
this remote northwestern region (Ningxia) 30 years ago, but have sent
little since and the east-west development gap is bigger than ever.
The result is one of the most serious interregional arguments since the
communists united China's many warlord fiefdoms in 1949.
Over the past decade, the central government focused on developing
coastal provinces, which have less than one-eighth of China's territory
but nearly half the 1.1 billion people.
It built ports, airports and highways to attract foreign companies, and
allowed eastern provinces to experiment more freely with market
mechanisms and reinvest their own tax revenues. The strategy worked.
Of the approximately 12,000 joint ventures with foreigners, more than
three-fourths are in or near coastal provinces, where they contribute
taxes, jobs and technology.
Skyscrapers and luxury hotels built with foreign capital altered the
skylines of eastern cities. Western fashion and fast-food outlets
brought a cosmopolitan air.
Local authorities in the vast hinterland watched the coastal boom with
growing discontent, which broke into the open when they demanded a
bigger share of central investment funds in the 1991-95 economic plan.
The conflict helped stall work for months on the plan, a staple of any
centrally planned economy.
A Communist Party document issued in December, designed to clear up
disputes over the plan, made clear the regional tussle was unresolved.
Western provinces want more investment, higher prices for their raw
materials and more freedom to experiment with a market-based economy in
short, a share in the coast's prosperity. In Gansu province,
northwestern China, the per capita rural income is less than half that
of coastal Zhejiang province. Gansu's illiteracy rate is 28 percent,
nearly double the national average.
Next to Gansu is the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, which has only one
hospital bed for every 400 people. Liaoning province in the northeast
has one for every 24.
The fact that most of China's ethnic minorities live in the western
provinces has sharpened the argument. Some minorities suspect prejudice
by the majority Han ethnic group is one reason the west has been allowed
to lag.
Ningxia, one of China's poorest areas, is a homeland for the Hui, a
Muslim minority. During a recent visit, many people spoke jealously of
the coast's prosperity and saw little hope of improving their own lot.
"People here have little money to spend, not like those in the south,"
a store clerk complained, referring to the booming southeast coast. His
shop in Yinchuan, the regional capital, was filled with people who
stared at expensive trinkets from the coast, like musical birthday
cards, but seldom bought them.
Yinchuan has the dusty, shabby look of a frontier town. The tallest
buildings are only half a dozen stories and its leading hotel, built 30
years ago, needs a paint job. Cars are so rare that bicyclists ride in
the middle of the roads, which quickly lead to farmland.
A government official said Ningxia got help from the coastal provinces
soon after the region was established in 1958.
"The coastal areas sent technology, skills and manpower starting from
the late 1950s, and the enterprises they set up became the core and
backbone of our industries," Fang Kechen, vice director of the Ningxia
Economic Restructuring Commission, said in an interview.
Most of the west's wealth is in natural resources and heavy industry.
Ningxia is the nation's fifth-largest producer of coal, much of it high
quality, is rich in other minerals and produces machine tools and
building materials.
To develop the east, the central government has kept the prices eastern
factories pay for coal and machinery artificially low. This helps
foster prosperity and political stability in such coastal cities as
Shanghai and Canton, but reduces the interior's income.
Interior regions also have been given less freedom than the coast to
carry out market-style reforms, and a nationwide turning away from
reform in the past two years has them worried.
"Under the planning and guidance of the government, it's still useful
to have reform policies," Fang said, choosing his words carefully.
"Ningxia especially needs this because, to develop Ningxia, money and
technology are needed, and that requires reform and opening to the
outside world."
He acknowledged that, even if Beijing gave the same concessions to
Ningxia, it could not match the coast's achievements.
Ningxia, about the size of Panama, has less than 280 miles of railway
and most of its 5,000 miles of roads are poorly paved or unpaved.
"If the transportation is not there, you can't get your products out,"
Fang said.
That makes foreign investment hard to come by.
In 1988, the last year for which figures are available, Ningxia received
$320,000 in foreign investment. Of China's other regions, only Tibet
had less.
Guangdong province on the southeastern coast, which adjoins Hong Kong,
signed contracts for $1.25 billion of foreign investment in 1988.
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3. Liberal Economist Resigns from Gorbachev's Staff...................93
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From: Yi Li <li%vanity.ncat.edu@cunyvm.cuny.edu>
Source: AP, January 19, 1991
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's personal economic adviser Nikolai
Petrakov, an advocate of a full-blooded market economy, has resigned in
the latest defection by a leading radical from the president's team.
His resignation came with a flourish as he was among 30 leading
radicals to sign an editorial in the weekly Moscow News, denounced by
Mr. Gorbachev, which condemned the army crackdown in Lithuania last
Sunday as "the crime of a regime which is unwilling to go".
Presidential spokesman Vitaly Ignatenko stressed Saturday that Mr.
Petrakov's decision came before Wednesday's publication of the Moscow
News article.
But Mr. Petrakov told Saturday's daily Komsomolskaya Pravda that he had
proferred his resignation on Thursday to Mr. Gorbachev, who had accepted
it, the day after the article was published.
The editorial, under the headline "Bloody Sunday" said that "a regime
in its death throes has a last-ditch stand: economic reform has been
blocked, censhorship of the media reinstated, brazen demagogy revived
and an open war on the republics declared".
The economist, who became Mr. Gorbachev's first personal economic
adviser a year ago, said in the interview that he had stood down
because he "was not listened to", and had been "unable to finish" his
plans for the transfer to a market economy.
He expressed scepticism that Mr. Gorbachev's new cabinet under former
finance minister Valentin Pavlov would successfully bring about a
market economy.
Mr. Petrakov also attacked the "populism" of political leaders, but
insisted that his relations with Mr. Gorbachev continued to be "good
and warm".
A Western economic analyst said Mr. Petrakov was "one of the few people
in the Soviet Union who understood what a market economy is".
Mr. Petrakov's resignation comes after Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard
Shevardnadze stood down last month, warning that dictatorship was around
the corner.
Former Politburo member and presidential adviser Alexander Yakovlev is
another radical who has abandoned his official activities.
Another Gorbachev economic adviser, Stanislav Shatalin, whose "500-days"
plan for a move to a market economy was rejected in October by the
Soviet parliament, said in Moscow News from his hospital bed this week:
"I no longer consider myself as one of the Gorbachev team".
Mr. Shatalin had been a member of the former presidential council, and
it was on his recommendation that Mr. Petrakov became a member of Mr.
Gorbachev's inner circle.
Mr. Gorbachev has denied responsibility for Sunday's attack on the
television tower in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius which left 14 people
dead and more than 100 injured, and blamed the local military commander.
But he has failed to condemn or take any action against the military.
He has also declined to dissolve National Salvation Committees set up by
local pro-Moscow communist parties since last week in all three Baltic
republics, which claim to have taken power from the elected
pro-independence governments.
Commentator Anatoly Karpychev on Saturday denounced Mr. Petrakov and the
other signatories of the Moscow News editorial in a Pravda article
entitled: "in defence of perestroika (restructuring), in defence of the
president".
Noting Western alarm that Mr. Gorbachev might be a hostage of the
military, he expressed incomprehension that the authors had "linked the
leader of perestroika" to the "regime's last hour".
He also suggested that other recent criticism of Mr. Gorbachev by
"independent" newspapers, evoking "dictatorship" and "bloodshed" was
"not by accident".
Like other comments in the official press, the article in the communist
party daily said that those responsible for the Lithuania crackdown
were not in Moscow and blamed Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis
for stirring up tensions.
Mr. Karpychev concluded that there was "no alternative to perestroika".
He also implicitly criticised Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, who has
supported the Baltic republics against Moscow since the crackdown.
In recent days "I can see not only blood and tears, but also a power
struggle, monstrous hypocrisy, duplicity, and an attempt to build one's
prestige on innocent blood. But nobody wants to recognise that", he
said.
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